


Segundo Parcial Literatura Inglesa

by lu_enoughreddie



Category: Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Genre: ahre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 08:43:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lu_enoughreddie/pseuds/lu_enoughreddie





	Segundo Parcial Literatura Inglesa

**The Jacobean Era **

The term "Jacobean" is often used for the distinctive styles of Jacobean architecture, visual arts, decorative arts, and **literature** which characterized that period.

Elizabeth I (1558-1603): Tudor Dynasty, English royal house of Welsh origin.

James I (1603-1621): was King of England and Ireland and of Scotland as James VI.

**William Shakespeare**

(23rd April, 1564-1616)

Dies the same day as Cervantes

Companies: “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men” (under Elizabeth I’s reign) that then turns into “The King’s Men” (under James I’s reign)

He never went to university. In 1582 he marries **Anne Hathaway**. They had a daughter, **Susan** (who was born 6 months after their marriage, so she was conceived before), and then twins, **Judith **and **Hamnet**. They lived in Stratford. When he dies, he leaves everything to his daughter and for his wife he only leaves the bed.

**The Seven Lost Years** (1585-1592) where there are no records of Shakespeare and then he suddenly appears in London, without his family and already a famous writer.

Robert Green, lawyer and writer, writes a lampoon (a piece of writing, a drawing, etc. that criticizes a famous person or a public organization in a humorous way) against Shakespeare, calls him “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”. When Shakespeare reappears in 1592, Green apologizes for this. This represents **external evidence** about the writer, that confirms he really existed. The **internal evidence** are the 37 plays and 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote.

  * Aprendices work, early plays: “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”.
  * Improvement: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
  * Masterpieces: “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “King Lear” and “Macbeth”.
  * Poems: “The Rape of Lucius” and “Venus and Adonis”.

1623: two fellow authors, take Shakespeare’s plays and publish them in the **First Folio Edition**, which contained three headings: comedies (17), tragedies (10) and historic (10). they also asked other authors to write poems to pay homage to him. Ben Jonson, who constantly criticized Shakespeare wrote: “He was not of an age, but for all time”. He later apologised.

**Plays **

Time: daylight

Place: open sky theater. The Blackfriars was a roofed theater that was too expensive.

Company: 15 actors Frequency: six months a years

Written: almost never in collaboration (except Middleton + Shakespeare = ”Henry 8th”) and without corrections (though Jonson was always correcting him)

Classical Unities: 1 plot, 1 day, 1 setting The opening scenes were a spectacle so as to catch the attention of the audience, which was very noisy.

Groundines: the audience, commoners

Costumes: elaborated, of silk and velvet. The novelty donated them to the actors.

Patrons: every theater company had one, because it was necessary to act. Licenses required patrons because they were the ones who financed the plays. Shakespeare’s company had the Queen, and later the King as patrons.

Propaganda: was forbidden but there usually was a man shouting at the door, and alto there were “sandwich men” (con el cartelito colgado). They used a flag with different colors to communicate which play was going to be on the theater.

  * white: comedy
  * black: tragedy
  * red: history. Historic plays emerged in Renaissance England. People wanted to know the past and history of their country, and hear about they heroes, specially poor people who could not read. There was a growing sense of nationalism, so people went to the theatre to learn about their nation, because theatre always teaches something (didactic purpose). So, in the categorization of these plays, histories only include plays about English history, not Roman (like Julius Caesar), or Scottish (like Macbeth) or Egypt (like Antony and Cleopatra). Those fall into the category of tragedies.

Puritan authorities: controlled all the shops. Didn’t want homosexual and prostitutes to play the role of saints (blasphemy). Makeup was related with prostitution, and you must not use it because you didn’t have to change the face that God has given to you. They complained when actors used costumes on the streets, they hated the theater and usually did everything to close them down. But although they were very much against theatre, they wouldn’t go against the royalty, which loved and supported theatres.

**Actor **

It was considered a rufian, a peasant. They couldn’t buy property (deed) because acting was not considered a profession, it was an unstable job (because they worked half a year).

Actors needed to have plenty of skills, it was a very unstable profession. They worked in a bare stage: no props, the setting was displayed in words, in a conversation. They had very elaborate costumes, most of them were presents, and not very historically accurate. They had a bad reputation, they were believed to be prostitutes or homosexuals. People complained about them, mostly puritans who hated them. Specially because of the clothes they used in the street. Later they were prohibited from using the stage costumes outside the theatre.

The actor needed to have:

  * good voice
  * man: women weren’t allowed to act
  * play some instruments sing and dance
  * memory. They didn’t rehearsed very much (they acted 15 days per play, it didn’t had much sense).

**Aristotle's Poetics **

It was about Tragedy, not comedy. Maybe comedy was a minor division of drama or maybe all the notes about comedy were lost. Comedy was full of discrimination (laughed about handicaps) and full of malapropisms (bad use of language).

It was believed that Aristotle’s Poetics was a **prescriptive book**, which you must follow in order to write a good tragedy, if not your tragedy is not valid. In reality, Poetics is a **descriptive book**, that is, it describes the tragedies of that time, because Aristotle took different handwritten and extracted patterns.

In this book, Aristotle explains that: “Tragedy is a process of **imitating an action which has serious implications** (mimesis), it’s **complete** and possesses **magnitude** (beginning, middle and end); by means of language which has been **sensuously attractive** (and the word in the same ragister); enacted by the persons themselves and no presented through narrative; through a course of **pity** (you feel sympathy for what the characters go through) and **fear** (what if that happened to me? mechanism of control) completing the purification (**catharsis**) of tragic acts, which have those emotional characteristics”.

**Shakespearean Tragedies **

Shakespeare wrote **10 tragedies**, every play is divided into **5 acts**. For his time, they were a new kind of tragedy.

**Main character**: a man (or Juliet or Cleopatra, who were the only female protagonists) represents a hero which belongs to the high class, is wealthy and therefore has power (because if you have money, you have power over people). Examples: Lear and Macbeth were kings, and Hamlet was a prince. There were **no low borne characters**, because it was a custom of the time, and because when **royalty dies** this has an effect all over the whole nation (magnitude).

**Tragic hero**: is the **artificient** of his own destiny, he does something that lead to another and so on and finally will lead to his own death. Always has a **tragic flaw**, called **hamartia** (weak spot). In Hamlet it was his procrastination, Othello was a very jealous man and idealized his wife, and in King Lear it was his rashness. They have **internal** (what’s going inside their mind) and **external problems** (what happens around him). The tragic hero is responsible for his own death, this is the essence of Shakespearean Tragedy (and the main difference with Aristotle’s Poetics); the hero must die. Also, the destruction of evil is not as important.

**Elements **in many shakespearean plays:

  * **abnormal conditions of mind** (madness, hallucinations, pathologies)
  * **supernatural elements** (witches, ghosts, soothsayers, terrible storms)
  * **fate or accident **

**Julius Caesar **

Themes 

  * The futility and political assassination

When you kill a personality you make a martyr of themselves, and therefore give them more power, examples of this are Martin Luther King and President Kennedy. In the play, by trying to end with the possible tyranny of Caesar and therefore not going back to monarchy, they try to eliminate his image. Brutus only wants to kill the spirit of Caesar, trying to justify the assassination, but therefore he has to spill his blood. This doesn’t work because he made a martyr out of Caesar; and his image and values as an emperor still lived, we see this when he comes backs as a ghost in two opportunities.

_Put an end on tyranny VS not wanting to go back to monarchy _

  * Sleep VS sleeplessness
  1. Sleep → reward for a clear conscience   
Lucius sleeps often because he has a clear conscience, we see this in Brutus’s house and while he playing the flute.
  2. Sleeplessness → punishment for a dirty conscience/worry   
→ or because you’re worried   
Brutus cannot sleep: in his house because he is worried about accepting becoming a conspirator in the war, because of the ghost, he has a dirty conscience at the end, he commits roman suicide, so as not to be captured but is also some kind of punishment because of his guilt. Unconsciously he knows that killing Caesar was assassinated.
  3. Dreams → premonitory   
Calpurnia’s dream
  * Supernatural elements  
Ghost Storm: walking dead, hands on fire, the lion   
Soothsayer: he can see the things that are going to happen   
Abnormal conditions of mind: hallucinations. Brutus has a pathology because he sees things that are not there (Caesar’s ghost).  
  

  * Who is the hero? The tragic hero is Brutus, because he has all the characteristics. But the play is called Julius Caesar, so that means he is the main character. This shows the biggest difference Shakespeare has with classic tragedies. Octavius Caesar is the perfect politician, he can not be the hero because he doesn’t die, the same as Antony.

Background 

45 b.C.

Republic (Rome) → three people in charge to avoid concentration of power, Gaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and Marcus Licinius Crassus (the Triumvirate). Not a democracy.

  * The death of Crassus ended the Triumvirate, and left Caesar and Pompey facing each other, Caesar finally defeats Pompey during a civil war. Now Caesar wants to become king, this would mean the Republic of Rome to become a Monarchy. And not many people agreed, Brutus fought with Pompey against Caesar.
  * People were celebrating Julius Caesar’s coming, after winning a battle.

Act 1

In the first scene, the conflict is presented, and there's a foreshadowing that predicts trouble coming. Flavius and Marullus are two tribunes (those who represent the people in the senate). They are angry at Julius Caesar, and want to disperse the crowd that supports him and take down the adornments. It’s not clear if they are killed or not.

**Julius Caesar:**

  * **demagog** (because he allows people to take a holiday to receive him).
  * **changing behavior** (from public to private man)
  * is **deaf** from his left ear (he turns to hear the soothsayer)
  * suffered from **epilepsy** (the falling sickness)
  * he is **superstitious **
  * **vane**: doesn’t think that anyone could kill or even think of killing him
  * **splitted personality**: talks about him in third person “the Caesar”
  * does **not fear death**: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death once” this reflects his sense of novelty.
  * speaks in **imperative** (this represents his power and personality)
  * **arrogant**, thinks of himself as a demigod, wants people to be ignorant (he distracts people with food, music or plays, thus making them into an unthinking mass)

Highborne characters speak in verse, while lowborn characters speak in prose. There’s also the use of formal and informal language (you/thou, your/thy or thine, etc.).

**Falconry Imagery**: is an english sport, where members of nobility used a trained falcon to hunt mice. This means that as a falcon, Caesar is going to fly too high and will have a lot of power, and everyone will become his servants.

**Lupercal**: fertility rite. There was a race, if women were touched by Lupercus (protector of flocks and herds) or by the leader, they were going to have a baby. They used a piece of leather called Februa, which gives name to the moth were this took place. Caesar puts Calpurnia (his wife) in the Lupercal celebrations.

**Dramatic Irony**: The audience know something that the character doesn’t, that Caesar is going to die. The soothsayer predicts it: “Beware of the Ides of March” (a deadline for settling debts). The Lupercal celebration is on 15th of February and the Ides of March on the 15th of March.

**Cassius:**

  * has no scrupules
  * teases Brutus to know what he thinks about Caesar, he casually drops comments like “except immortal Caesar” to see how he reacts to the obscure comment
  * is part of the conspiracy to kill Caesar, and tries to persuade Brutus (because they need him to turn their cause into a noble cause)
  * he doesn’t think Caesar deserves the power and the fame of a God, he actually thinks he is weak because he once saved him from drowning. He tells that story to Brutus in order to belittle the image of a god that Julius Caesar has. Caesar governs with womans spirits, he is a tyrant. He believes they are slaves under Caesar’s rule. Later he sends many letters to Brutus, he’s very insisting.

**Brutus:**

  * very honorable man
  * fought with Pompey, against Caesar, but he is in debt with him because when he was a prisoner Caesar set him free. And now is kind of a son to Caesar.
  * if he’s convinced into killing Caesar, everyone will understand the murder was done for the greater good. Because if it’s done by an honourable man, it would make it an honourable action.

**The Storm:**

  * walking dead
  * hands on fire
  * a lion

Casca runs away from the storm, he never saw one like that. Defines it as wonderful, meaning monstrous / horrible. Unnatural things appear. Cicero interprets another thing, he’s not afraid because as a famous philosopher, he’s a reasonable man.

Act 2 

All the conspirators were recruited, except for Brutus. They need to put together the plot.

**Brutus speech to himself:**

It must be by Caesar's death (he begins with the closure, Caesar is a poisonous snake that will sting them to death, “and we have to kill him ono the shell”. He uses a lot of abstract nouns, which are dangerous to politicians, because people may not understand what they are saying. He believes that Caesar abuses of the power and he needs to be stopped (by his death).

**Conspirator reunion:**

  * They hide their faces
  * need to control their gestures when they are with Caesar, because he could suspect
  * propose to take an **oath**, but Brutus says they do not need it because it’s a **Honorable Cause **
  * Cassius proposes to kill Caesar and Marc Anthony
  * Brutus explains Caesar’s death as a sacrifice, because they are not butcher nor murderers.

They don’t realize that by killing him they **empower the spirit** of what Caesar really is (futility of political assassination).

Conspirators mentioned: Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Trebonius, Ligarius, Decius Brutus, Metellus Cimber and Cinna.

**Portia: **

  * awesome character
  * knows that something troubles Brutus and demands to know, “I’m your wife, if you don’t tell me nothing I’m just a harlot (prostitute)”. Brutus doesn’t tell her because doesn’t want to make her an accomplice
  * She’s loving, caring and very clever they are a beautiful couple, they share everything, and she would do anything to protect her husband.
  * she kills herself when Brutus scapes. She thought the Triumvirate was coming after her, she swallowed fire, so as no to become a prisoner (**Roman suicide = bravery)**. In Shakespeare times, suicide was considered an act of cowardly.

**Superstitions:**

Caesar makes a sacrifice due to Calpurnia’s dream, where he is murdered and his murderers wash their hands with his blood. The death of Caesar is coming, Artemidorus tries to warn him by writing him a letter but he never reads it, and the soothsayer appears again and tells Caesar that the Ides of March had arrived but they weren’t gone.

**Planes of correspondence:**

(from the outside to the inside)

  * **Macrocosm**: nature (the storm)
  1. **Political Body**: those who have power, who make history (Caesar and Brutus)
  2. **Conspiracy **
  * **Microcosm**: the little world of man, the individuals

If something happens in one of the planes, this affects the other plane.

Act 3 

Is the **mechanical centre of the play** (very common in Shakespeare’s plays). Act 3 tends to be the most spectacular. Here, there are two climaxes: the assassination (dramatic climax) and both the speeches (linguistic climax). Then, it shows the effects, the consequences.

SCENE 1 - Dramatic Climax

Casca is the first to stab Caesar, they don’t kill Marc Antony. The conspirators didn’t know what to do after the assassination, this is the turning point in the play. Anthony sends a servant to ask if it’s safe for him to go and ask why did they kill Caesar, Brutus (naive and honourable) accepts, while Cassius (cautious and practical) suspects.

**Mistakes they make**: to leave Marc Antony alive, and then to let him speak after Brutus in Caesar’s funeral. This creates the **contra conspiracy** led by Anthony, who get help from Octavious (Caesar’s nephew). Son and nephew avenge the father.

SCENE 2 - Linguistic Climax

Here it appears again the **unthinking mass** (the citizens)

**Brutus’s speech**: this is one of the most famous of Shakespeare works

  * appeals the **intellect **
  * Many subordinating conjunctions of reason, always explaining why.
  * Rhetorical questions
  * His speech fails because he uses many **abstract concepts** that people don’t understand, they need concrete things. Also, is full of **contradictions**, it’s **illogical**.

Antony's speech:

  * appeals to **emotion **
  * he indirectly **incites people to revolt**.
  * He lies about the events of the assassination (because he wasn’t there) and people believe him.

Marc Antony succeeds in “**moving the people**”, and Brutus and Cassius scape from Rome. The new government will be a **Triumvirate**, formed by Antony, Octavius and Lepidus.

SCENE 3 - Consequences

One of the consequences of his speech is that the citizens **kill a poet** because he was called Cinna like one of the conspirators. His speech **turned citizens into monsters**.

Act 4 

A year goes by. Nobody really knows who the real enemy is, the conspirators have run away, but they raised an army and there will be a war. There’s a new Triumvirate: Antony, Lepidus and Octavius. They’ve made a list of people to kill, a revenge for killing Caesar.

**Octavius Caesar: **

  * young
  * Caesar’s nephew
  * future emperor

**Lepidus: **

  * unfit, will be discarded by Antony, who suggests there are fake people pretending to be their friend but actually are enemies.
  * compared to a horse, in literature it represents no brains but strength and sexual power.

**Idealism vs. Reality:**

Brutus and Cassius friendship has cooled, there’s distance between them. They are angry. Cassius has taken bribes from people to subtent the war. People from Sardin, where they are now. This is illegal, and Brutus claims that they didn’t kill Caesar to defend robbers, he doesn’t want dirty money. Cassius, always the practical, acted more by instinct than Brutus, who says that’s not honourable.

But they **need to pay soldiers**, either with clean money (honest dealing) or with dirty money (necessity); in times of war, “the result justifies the means” said Machiavelli. This is the scene that marks the beginning of the end. In the end they make amends, and celebrate with wine, that is a symbol of friendship.

**Ways of seeing life:**

  * Epicurean: driven away by emotions. Cry, scandal, express strong suffering. Cassius.
  * Stoics: endure everything rationally, no feelings. Like Brutus with Portias’s death, or when he asks Cassius not to fight in front of their army.

**War strategy:**

  * Attack: Brutus thinks that if they wait, the Triumvirat will march and more people will join them, mostly people they had taken money from.
  * Wait: Cassius thinks he’ll fight better if they wait, because they will not be tired, and their enemies will. However, Cassius accepts to go straight to Philippy to face Antony’s army.

**Caesar’s Ghost:**

This could mean something wrong or good. The ghost appears to Brutus and tells him he is going to lose the battle. And here we realize that Brutus, by killing Caesar, was not able to kill his spirit.

Act 5 

**The War:**

Is Cassius birthday, and he feels they are going to lose the battle and he is going to die; because eagles flew away and crows showed up, like if the army was the prey (premonition).

Brutus vs Octavius: Brutus wins. Cassius vs Antony: Cassius loses, his soldiers run away, they dessert.

Cassius kills himself.

Brutus kills himself.

DA END.


End file.
